jdcool10

What really changes is YOU, Trelco, and that is everything. In a simulated environment, you have no emotion at play (that fear and greed thing that causes us not to follow our rules, aka taking profit too early or moving our stop loss in a wrong direction). Therefore whether your systeme looses $1 or a thousannd does not change your mood or thought or feelings. Once real money is involved and your position is in the red, they DO COME INTO PLAY and you throw the rationale behind your system down the drain. And I think that is also true even if you have an automated system because the market itself changes while your system does not. You would have to make adjustement to curve fit it or correct it according to the market and you are in a never ending adjudsting mode ....of an automated system... Just my two cents P.S- About TAMS' comments earlier, if you use Ninja Trader software, it allows you to record and replay the markets as it has happened with ticks and the like, thus allowing you to backtest your strategy and see how YOU would have performed if you would have recognized and taken the signals as they occured.